Magnifying Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans - Page 2
© Pamela St. Clair
Christopher keeps the magnifying glass and uses it throughout his investigative career. Like any magnifying glass, it exaggerates and distorts; hence, it provides an apt metaphor for Christopher’s memories which, clouded with nostalgia, seem to discard the ugly and encompass and enlarge only the idyllic. His desire to disinfect the past and to keep it shrouded in a blanket of naiveté seems incongruous with the heinous crime scenes he encounters in his profession. He witnesses human nature at its worst yet refuses to acknowledge it clearly. Hence, as a narrator, he concedes the brutality of murder scenes but never divulges any details. Christopher exists cloaked in a shawl of denial.
Correspondingly, he attributes an unrealistic purity to the childhood he recounts. He also naively protects himself from acknowledging dark traits in people he admires, such as the determination of his love interest Sally Hemmings to date only those who can keep her afloat in high society. He dismisses the possiblity that she could be so callous. When he adopts an orphaned girl named Jennifer, he seems determined to shelter her as he shelters his own past. When he returns to Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese war, however, he leaves Jennifer temporarily behind in his obsessive quest for his parents. He will likewise leave Sally behind.
Upon arriving in the city, he occasionally thinks that he sees among various crowds his childhood neighbor Akira, about whom we learn a lot in Christopher’s flashbacks to his childhood in Shanghai. He hopes to meet up with him, yet does not actively pursue locating his friend’s address, as if he’s aware that some truth he cannot abide will be revealed by the passage of time. Later, in a poignant scene near the novel’s conclusion, Christopher’s naiveté grows exponentially along with the increasingly surreal atmosphere the narrative acquires. His zealous quest for his parents blinds him to the war reality surrounding him. As his childhood past zooms toward his present search, he does not realize that the Japanese army is not going to spare the young girl he meets whose family has just been annihilated. Unbelievably, when he first encounters her against a backdrop of bombed out houses and bloody carnage, he consoles her, “it’s awfully bad luck. But look, you’ve survived, and really, you’ll see, you’ll make a pretty decent show of it if you just...if you just keep up your courage...”
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